He'd once declared that the kimono was actually the most sensual

garment in the world. Take a look at some of the shunga, he said, and
the possibilities become obvious. Though it seems cumbersome,
entangling, yet it lifts away like a stage curtain to invite all sorts of
dramatic possibilities. The human nude is only interesting when half
concealed.
Games. She reached and took the petal from him, then ran it along
the silk of his own kimono, over his muscular thighs as he sat, Japanese-
style, feet back. Next she lifted away the silk from the flawless ivory skin
she knew so well. She drew it along his thighs to tease him.
"Tam . . ." He reached to slip away her yukata, but she
caught his hand. Then she touched his lips with her fingers, silencing
his protest. She pushed away his kimono and trailed the petal upward,
lightly brushing his own nipples. Finally she pushed him gently
backward and smoothed her cheek against his thigh, drawing back his
kimono even more.
The glow of the coals was dying now. As the last shadows played
against his face, she laid the petal on the tatami and moved across him. .
..
They lingered till the moon was up, then strolled back through the
garden wearing their antique wooden clogs. The air was scented,
musical with the sounds of night. Later that evening they downed an
eight-course meal off antique stoneware plates, drank steaming sake on
the veranda, then made love for hours on the futon.
Around midnight he ordered one more small bottle of sake, a go,
and suggested they move out onto the veranda again, this time to watch
the moon break over the trees. She slipped on her yukata and padded
out. She'd just decided.
"Tamara, I want to tell you something." He poured her small
porcelain cup to the brim. "You are everything Matsuo Noda is seeking.
The way you held the tea bowl tonight, tasted the tea. The cha-no-yu
doesn't lie. You have discipline, our discipline. That's very, very rare."
"You mean, 'for a gaijin'?"
"For anyone. Besides, I don't think of you that way. You are one of
us now."
She looked into his eyes, dark in the moonlight. Then she
remembered the tokonoma alcove in the teahouse where a rugged vase
had held the single white bud, its few petals moist as though from dew.
Not a bouquet, a single bud—all the flowers in the world distilled into
that one now poised to burst open.
 Kenji Asano lived that special intensity, that passion, which set
Japan apart from the rest of the world.
"Ken." Her voice was quiet. "I'll do it."
"You mean Noda?"
"Noda."
He said nothing for a moment, then finally he spoke.
"The game begins."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Over the last three weeks I'd spent long hours on the phone
handling Matsuo Noda's new hedging in the currency markets. The play
started out modestly, but as his Eight Hundred Year funds became
bloated with cash, it grew into an avalanche of speculative positions.
His guiding principle was to keep a low profile in order not to
spook the markets, same as any good trader would do. Whenever the
FOREX desk of one market-maker bank on his list would start getting
nervous, I'd just hit the next place in line. Finally after everybody on this
side of the ocean began backing away, he went international. Zurich, in
particular, loved the action and took everything he threw in its
direction. I guess the Swiss are used to high rollers, since their financial
casino never got cold feet and invented a house limit.
Somewhere along the way I also came to realize I couldn't possibly
be the only agent in his employ; there was far too much money to move.
Also my list of contracts eventually got pared to manageable levels, so
somebody else had to be picking up the slack. It appeared that just as I
was spreading the action he'd assigned to me all over the globe, he was
spreading his own assignments worldwide. The man had to be covering
a major chunk of the world market in interest-rate futures and currency
forwards, but not a penny of it was traceable to Japan. Or to Matsuo
Noda.
 How, I kept marveling, could this be happening right under the
nose of all our supposed geniuses of world finance? One thing, Noda
had all his moves down pat. My hunch was he'd started routing a lot of
short selling through Sydney and Hong Kong, and also was hitting the
off-exchange "third market," anyplace he could find somebody to take
his bets. If you remember how the dollar plunged in the mid-eighties,
you'll also recall that anybody who'd had the foresight to dump it in
advance would have been sitting pretty. Plenty of traders did, but none
of them received any particular attention, since the pond is so huge. In
cumulative totals the currency exchanges worldwide easily handle as
much as two hundred billion dollars a day. Although DNI's massive
short position clearly signaled that somebody major was anticipating a
crash of the dollar, Noda realized that all he had to do was keep moving
and nobody would put it together.
Need I add that my own little dollar hedge for Amy was peanuts
compared to what was going on now. Dai Nippon through its
anonymous agents was dumping American currency in the multi-
billions worldwide, but since Noda kept the action spread out, nobody
bothered to notice the pattern. Ditto his awesome "naked" shorting of
Treasury futures. I mean, anybody who'd troubled to assemble the
numbers could have predicted somebody up on the bridge must have
sighted a reef dead ahead. I kept trying to warn traders I knew, both on
and off the exchanges, but nobody wanted to hear downbeat speculation
from some Cassandra. They were all too busy pocketing commissions
and ordering more champagne.
And then it happened. In broad daylight. I'll explain the operative
details shortly, but if you were there, that could be a little like reviewing
the theory underlying nuclear fission for somebody standing at ground
zero when the bomb hit. So first let me recollect how it felt down in the
trenches.
I was breakfasting at the dining room table downstairs that
particular Monday morning—November 7, as we all remember so
vividly—when Matsuo Noda dropped the first shoe, or maybe it's more
accurate to say he began loosening the laces. I'd just finished squeezing
some orange juice when I punched in the number of a financial update
service on my trusty cordless phone, mainly to hear the (recorded)
sound of a human voice. I'd totally forgotten the U.S. Treasury was
holding its quarterly refunding that day.
Newsbreak. Dealer banks were reporting that demand for the long
bond, the thirty-year, was extremely soft to nonexistent. Equally
unnerving, there wasn't any noticeable interest in Treasury's ten-year
notes either. The reason seemed to be that the usual heavy participation
by major Japanese investment houses (typically twenty to forty percent
of the total) had inexplicably evaporated. In fact, a rumor currently
flying across
the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade said a number of Japanese
securities houses and banks in New York had begun what appeared to
be a program to divest their current Treasury holdings massively. Since
spokespersons at Japanese outfits like Nomura and Daiwa Securities had
clammed up, refusing to deny that rumor, the usual institutional buyers
like Oppenheimer and Goldman, Sachs were holding back, nervous.
Hang on, I said to myself. Can this mean we're about to test out
Henderson's "worst case" scenario, that Japanese pullout all the analysts
say could never happen? But there's no reason. No sudden icebergs out
ahead. . . .
Noda. I said the word out loud. Noda's kicked off his play.
I almost laughed at the thought of his naivete. Was this going to be
his game? Who was he planning to fool? For once you've got a little
surprise in store, chum. Treasury may have to sweeten the pot, but
there's a lot of money in the world. The United States of America can't
be blackmailed.
Then I glanced out at the blue morning sky, empty except for a
single swooping sparrow, and had a strange premonition, one of those
mystical moments when everything sparkles with crystalline clarity. I
had this feeling I can't explain. Still in a reverie I carefully set down my
orange-juice glass, walked upstairs to the "office," and dialed one of the
computers into Reuters's Wall Street service. How were the securities
markets taking the news? It was already ten-thirty, time enough for
some initial response.
Dear God. For a second or so I just stared at the numbers in
disbelief. What was happening? Noda hadn't gone near the stock
market.
I quickly switched on the TV and located CNN, which was already
carrying a special report live from the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange. There stood a badly shaken Lou Dobbs, minus his tie. Minus,
in fact, his jacket. The scene around him was pandemonium.
". . . and the Dow Jones Average . . ."—he glanced down at a
monitor—". . . has dropped six hundred and eighty points in the last
twenty minutes. . . ." At that moment somebody jostled against the
cameraman, giving us a momentary view of the ocean of paper buy-and-
sell slips littering the floor. "A hundred and ninety million shares have
already changed hands in the first half hour of trading this morning. ..."
My God, I thought, the market is in free-fall. Was Meltdown
Monday in '87 just the warm-up?
"As yet unconfirmed rumors concerning a slow foreign response to
today's Treasury auction . . ."—although he was weighing his words
carefully to give the appearance of calm, the hasty makeup on his
forehead was already beginning to bubble with perspiration— ". . . seem
to be responsible for what most analysts are describing as an entirely
inappropriate overreaction in securities prices here this morning. ..."
What else could he say? It was as though everybody's gnawing,
primal fear had just been confirmed. There really was a hairy beast
lurking in the bedroom closet, waiting to jump out and eat us in our
sleep. The market was running to mommy: safe and soothing cash.
Next he made the tactical error of buttonholing a couple of floor
traders and specialists for comments. They didn't bother to mince
words. Their one, terrified question: Had Japan finally decided to let the
U.S. and its towering debt just twist slowly in the wind? If that
happened, U.S. capital would simply dry up, sucked in by Treasury's
massive money-sponge: interest rates would soar, murdering the U.S.
economy. The Great Depression of the nineties.
As I watched, a bulletin started running across the bottom of the
screen: bids on the new issue of thirty-year bonds had now dropped an
amount equivalent to raising their return almost two full interest points.
I zeroed in as the text continued. Worse news. The "coverage ratio,"
which measures how many more bidders there are than necessary, had
plummeted from 2.7 to 1.3. And still dropping. More and more
potential buyers were running for cover.
Lou, who was now surrounded by traders in blue jackets and
couldn't see his own monitor, was assuring his viewers that experienced
market analysts were all saying the slowdown in Treasury action did not
accurately reflect worldwide demand, that deutsche marks and pounds
sterling undoubtedly were already winging westward to take advantage
of the new higher rates.
Sweating there in his melting pancake, the poor guy had no inkling
the patient was slipping into a coma just as he'd forecast full recovery.
Well, I thought, there's always prayer. Anything's possible. But . . .
as Henderson used to say, if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their
ass.
 I got up to go downstairs and pour another cup of coffee. Coming
back, I decided to forget about the stock market for a moment and just
focus on Treasury, so I clicked on my Telerate service and scrolled
through the financial quotes.
Friends, by that time there was no, repeat no, market out there for
Treasury paper. Now that the Japanese dealers appeared to be dumping
everything, European banks had hit the sidelines, waiting to see what
transpired. Would rates continue to move up? Would Treasury be
forced to withdraw the issue? Should everybody be bailing out now
before bond prices went through the deck and demolished years of
interest earnings? Looming over it all was that standing terror of the
bond markets: no liquidity.
Back to Cable News Network. An officer from one of the dealer
banks (which bid on big chunks of Treasury paper, then retail it) had
rushed over to CNN's midtown studios and was explaining to us all it
was clearly nothing more than some minor trans-Pacific
communications snarl. The problem, obviously, was simple: Japanese
securities firms here just hadn't received authorization from their head
offices in Tokyo, where it was after business hours. A clarification would
be forthcoming any minute now.
Well, if you've ever been turned down for a mortgage and you
fantasized a day when you'd see that high-and-mighty clerk behind the
desk have to ask you for a loan, I hope you caught that one. This paper-
shuffler whose secretary had a secretary had agreed a week earlier to
take on three billion dollars of Treasury's new debt issues—paper he
now couldn't give away, let alone resell—and he was practically on his
knees begging America to save his bank.
What the hell was going on? My mild-mannered friend Matsuo
Noda had inadvertently (I assumed) kicked off a major financial panic.
I clicked the dial over to Financial News Network, FNN, which had
momentarily interrupted its heavy midday fare of California snake-oil-
and-options hucksters. Now a decidedly pale investment banker, this
one an unindicted employee of Drexel Burnham, was declaring it was all
merely a little "tempest in a teapot." His precise words. The Japanese
securities houses wouldn't dare pull out their funds and kill the market,
he explained. It was absurd. If they did that, their investors would lose a
fortune, since any big sell-off would automatically drive down the value
of their own massive portfolio. Ergo, Japan's funds had no choice but to
stay invested. No problem.
 My friend, I thought, where have America's bankers been? Out
repossessing some widow's Chevy? As a matter of fact the Japanese
outfits here don't give a flying fig what happens to our debt market. If
you'd been doing your job, you'd know that Matsuo Noda had already
sold Treasury futures far in excess of Japan's portfolio back when values
were still high. Now he can go out and pick up all the notes and bonds
he wants, cost approximately nothing, and turn around and deliver
them at yesterday's full price. The man must feel like a riverboat
cardsharp who's lucked into a saloon full of Huck Finns on payday.
Don't you realize he's just cleaned you out, right down to the fillings in
your teeth? And now he's got his team on the bus ready to roll.
Over to CBS, a Special Report underway. It featured a stream of
well-meaning and incoherent Treasury officials, none of whom had the
slightest inkling what to say. Then Jack O'Donnell came on from the
Senate pressroom, breathing fire. The administration's "light at the end
of the deficit tunnel" had turned out to be a freight train heading our
way, just as he'd predicted. America's debt chickens were coming home
to roost. He was demanding that the Speaker call a joint session of
Congress this very day and by God do something.
Right, Jack. What? Looks like our pal Matsuo Noda is about to have
the U.S. of A. exactly where he wants us. By the balls.
I guess I must have been operating solely on instinct by then,
because a phone number popped into my head that I hadn't recalled in
years. Sam Kline, my old broker at Merrill Lynch. I hadn't talked to Sam
in ages, but his number used to come to my fingers whenever the
market started acting up. Maybe he was sort of a father figure. Truth is,
I'd first learned what little I know about the market watching that giant
ticker ML had up at one end of the office just above Sam's desk—and
long gone in this age of computers. I remembered how heavy trades—
over ten thousand shares—were marked with stars, always fun to watch.
Forget the "financial experts." They were reduced to spouting pure
gibberish. Time to check in at the real front line. Sam Kline.
Maybe I just wanted to have Sam to soothe me like in the old days,
pour some of that dreadful coffee he had in his Thermos, tug down the
cuffs of his trousers, and say not to worry, there's always tomorrow, the
disaster in my portfolio merely reflected a long-overdue and healthy
"correction" in the market. (Only years later did I finally realize that
"correction" was a special Wall Street expression meaning all the stocks
you own just tanked.)
 When Sam finally got around to my call, he was barely coherent but
still trying.
"Matt, what's new?" There was turmoil and yelling behind him, as
though the office was about to go under a wrecking ball.
"You tell me."
"Well, at the moment it's something of a downside morning, but—"
"Sam," I snapped, "this is me, Matt, save the Pollyanna."
A short pause, and then he crumbled. "Matthew, want the truth?
The Monday Massacre of '87 was a rally compared to this. That crash
was just stocks. This time it's U.S. bonds, the dollar, everything. The
market's falling apart. Right this minute the trust departments at First
Boston and Morgan are dumping entire sectors like they were some
nervous greenhorn in Oshkosh. Pension fund managers I've known for
years are liquidating whole blocks 'at the market,' for whatever they can
get. One specialist downtown just told me he had to eat a hundred
thousand shares of, Christ, General Dynamics. You can't give away
Northrop. And Lockheed, forget it. . . ." Another pause. "God Almighty,
Matt, we need a market up here. How about—"
"Not now, Sam." It was like hanging up on my own father. A knife
in my heart. "Look, I'll get back to you. Best to Naomi."
Good God. I wanted to hire an airplane and skywrite a big sign over
downtown: WAIT. Trouble was, I wasn't sure myself what it was all
about.
However, there was one thing I could do. I punched in the contact
number for Dai Nippon, uptown, and told the polite little lady who
answered the phone to get Tanaka on the line this goddam minute.
About ten seconds later he was there.
"Are you guys nuts?" I yelled. "Doesn't anybody up there know
what's happening?"
"We are well aware of the situation, Mr. Walton."
"Well, then, do something, for chrissake!"
"Our securities dealers here are in contact with the appropriate
officials. Nothing is to be done without explicit instructions from Noda-
san. He has not yet been in communication."
"Well, get him in communication."
"There is no cause for alarm, Mr. Walton." He continued calmly.
"Noda-san has made sure that our dealers' exposure in Treasuries is
covered by the futures contracts DNI has acquired. Japanese investors
are sheltered from price fluctuations. Noda-san is most grateful for
your—"